True to form, President Trump, kicked off Wednesday’s NATO summit by tossing a grenade. This one was in German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s direction and aimed at the country’s dependency on natural gas imports from Russia.

It’s not clear whether Trump’s goal in targeting Merkel this morning was to shame Germany into putting more money into NATO or to encourage the Germans to buy more natural gas from the United States. But if it’s the second, that will be very difficult to achieve.

Germany currently receives about a third of its current 80 billion cubic meters of annual natural gas supply from Russia, nearly all transported by pipelines running through Eastern Europe. Europe as a whole consumed about 425 billion cubic meters of natural gas last year, of which about 150 billion cubic meters came from Russia…